Yesterday it was announced that GNOME 3.0 is delayed till next year. The extra time has given the Shell Developers some more time to play around with new concepts and they have come up a new mockup. Here are the new mockups.

Congratulations! You know how to jump down someone's throat via the anonymity of the internet! You think your opinion means crap! You have the social graces of colicky, diaper-clad fuss-pot!

You're special!

Well guess what? I can condescend, too.

"
Nope, Gnome is actually doing pretty well.

By what measure? "

By whatever measure the author chooses, smartass. I'll pick a few for you, though: stability, rapid prototyping, community involvement, popularity.

"Gnome Shell is really the only major fundamental change in Gnome 3. And it's just a window manager. The apps are largely the same.

So the thing that users interact with every day all day is fundamentally different. Just like KDE's plasma. The apps most people use (Firefox, Openoffice) didn't change there either. "

But get this: Nobody's gonna make you use Gnome Shell! Isn't that crazy?! It's actually a new piece of software. They're giving you choice (stick with Metacity + Gnome Panel or try Gnome Shell). In fact, you could just as easily run Gnome with any window manager.

Novel, huh?

Of course, you know what this means: You're bitching about nothing. Not nothing, even. You're bitching about additional choice in an open source project (which is currently desperately soliciting direct feedback and contributions from the community) on a distant forum, far removed from the people who could or would care, and you don't even have the courtesy to use a constructive tone. Ingrate.

If you should win the lottery, do you see yourself whining about the size of the check?

"No, it's not. The desktop needs something new.

Why? Just cause? What precise problem would that solve? How exactly will a new desktop paradigm solve problems for users? Will it make them faster? Different just cause you're bored with the standard is not a good reason for change unless you're making a toy. "

Leap to conclusions much?

Perhaps the desktop needs to be revolutionized because 40% of the screen real estate on my netbook is monopolized by redundant toolbars and rarely-used buttons.

Perhaps tabbed applications have finally made multi-tasking accessible and comprehensible to the masses, and they're now ready to unite task management paradigms.

Perhaps there are more needs and opinions on these things than just your own.

" KDE 4 is probably the most impressive desktop right now, and it's still just the basic taskbar, windows, widgets, etc. There is a lot out there that has not been explored.

Many many things have been explorer and discarded because they didn't work. You developers see the status quo and think no one has tried anything else. People have tried tons of different things and they didn't improve the situation so they were dropped. But if you don't actually go and read the research and history you would never know. "

"We developers" have every bit as much of a view of history as you (probably more, given your uninformed opinion thus far). Your reasoning is so circularly idiotic, I'm going to have difficulty explaining it to you without actually hurting my own intelligence in the process, but I'll keep it bite-sized: Improvement necessarily involves change. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. By not changing, GNOME ceases to become technology and stagnates.

Or are you actually suggesting that technology is driven forward by... not changing anything? Because if that's the case, you're free to use (literally free) the existing versions of GNOME that work perfectly for you. Nobody's twisting your arm to upgrade your free desktop environment.